In which Tom Blackmore explores the impact of ECHR on his mother (born Pamela Maxwell Fyfe) the principal patron of this project.
Sitting with my mother, Pamela, in her care home, I think how much she is a child of the Convention that her father, David Maxwell Fyfe, championed and drafted. She was with him in Strasbourg in 1949 as work started at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe where the list of rights were being drawn up.
She believes in justice, the right to a fair trial, and no punishment without fair trial. For 30 years she was a Justice of the Peace and Chair of the Bench in Greenwich and Woolwich. For several of those she was considered a ‘lucky JP’ by the local police when they needed their warrants signed.
She believes passionately in the freedom of thought, conscience and religion. A child of another age, she never countenanced capital punishment, disagreeing with her father even when he was Home Secretary. But the disagreement didn’t stop her accompanying him to dinner at the House of Commons on the evening of his controversial Bentley decision. She considers, debates, and respects.
In quiet ways she is politically aware and active, supporting political candidates including John Sutcliffe in North Yorkshire and on her return to London providing a base camp for the present Father of the House, Peter Bottomley when he first stood for Parliament.
She is against discrimination and has a profound lifelong sense of equality. Her mother Sylvia was a suffragist and political activist who worked closely alongside her father, which gave her an insight into equality between sexes. Pamela is the first woman in the family to be university educated. She studied PPE at Oxford, at the college, which when it relented and let in men, educated Michael Gove and Dominic Raab. Afterwards she worked with Grace Wyndham Goldie at the BBC, and later worked on Equal Opportunities for Women at the Industrial Society. At home she developed and empowered her three daughters alongside her son.
She is the personification of the freedom to enjoy family life, marriage and home. At each stage in her life she has been a focus, relishing the freedoms that have enabled her to keep a welcoming, supportive home.
She exercises her right to a wonderful life, bringing warmth and light to those around her.
Many people have commented, with a greater or lesser degree of enthusiasm, that this is a family show, and very personal. I am inclined to agree with Nora Ephron:
‘And what’s so wrong about personal anyway? Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.’
You’ve Got Mail, 1998 film written by Nora Ephron
Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms are not just laws, they are a way understanding ourselves, and they are under threat…
It is extraordinary the way the great events of our world today have bounced back through time to shake up the story we are telling.
November 2020 marked TWO historic anniversaries in which David Maxwell Fyfe, a twentieth century British politician and lawyer played a significant role. To commemorate, a new generation of his family set out to share his story, only to find that it wasn’t an easy tale to tell. Here they take up the tale.
We were delighted when the then head of the Oxford History Faculty, Martin Conway wrote in 2017:
‘The more serious business of History too dances to the rhythms of anniversaries’
And we became determined to make our story dance.
For November 2020 marks the rhythm of TWO significant interwoven anniversaries linked by shared endeavour but separated by a period of 5 years. November 4th is the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Convention on Human Rights forged in Strasbourg and signed in Rome. November 20th is the 75th anniversary of the opening of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, better known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.
These two anniversaries sit either side of the Armistice, and both events form important landmarks as the world recovered after the Second World War. They share the expression of a deep desire to make things right.
David Maxwell Fyfe
Some characters took part in both events. One was David Maxwell Fyfe, and it is through his eyes that we see these anniversaries.
Dreams of Peace & Freedom : The Human’s in the Telling is the product of two decades of exploration of the papers of David Maxwell Fyfe. Fifteen years ago we staged Making History, a play based on the letters he had exchanged with his wife Sylvia from Nuremberg. Ten years ago we launched Kilmuir Papers with Under an English Heaven, a first pass at telling the story of Maxwell Fyfe’s journey from Nuremberg to Strasbourg.
Every step taken to relate our tale over this time has proved far more difficult than you might expect: everything from the prevailing political climate, Maxwell Fyfe’s comparative obscurity, enthusiasm for Europe, and later social conservatism hampered progress and any chance of getting support. The argument about Brexit in the House of Commons was heating up as we began working on plans for our joyful dance of commemoration, and we are telling the story of a Conservative who wholeheartedly supported the European Project.
In fact we have been led on a merry dance. For as well as the canvas of Brexit, this story has now unexpectedly been told against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic. Like so many others, we have been denied the opportunity to fulfil our planned tour of performances, the centrepiece to our dance.
Perhaps more importantly, we are now living in a world where the rights and freedoms that had been enshrined in law post war, that David Maxwell Fyfe had championed and many of us have taken for granted, were summarily suspended at a stroke. The right to freedom of assembly, the right to a free trial, the right to worship, the right to marry, many would say the right to freedom of expression. All were removed so that we could protect ourselves from the virus.
Suddenly there were now two stories to match the two anniversaries.
It is extraordinary the way the great events of our world today have bounced back through time to shake up the story we are telling. We don’t know how our story will play out, but we are sure that Maxwell Fyfe’s story should be widely shared and remembered as we deal with the present missteps and misdemeanours and move forward into a post-Covid world.
Having seen the beautiful old city centre with ancient beamed buildings and a vast cathedral, it was a shock to travel by tram out to the much newer European Quarter where these important institutions are housed.
The European Convention on Human Rights was signed in Rome 70 years ago this year. However, Strasbourg is where the Convention was drafted and houses many of the buildings essential to its function alongside European parliamentary institutions. Lily visited the capital of Europe in 2013 and here she describes her impressions alongside the photos she took...
We first visited Strasbourg in 2013 when there was barely a murmur about the UK removing itself from the European Union. Having grown up with Maxwell Fyfe’s story, it has been difficult for me to understand why people want to take us out of a union that has given us 70 years of peace, prosperity and freedom for all its members. The capital of Europe, Strasbourg is home to the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights.
European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg
Having seen the beautiful old city centre with ancient beamed buildings and a vast cathedral, it was a shock to travel by tram out to the much newer European Quarter where these important institutions are housed. Each of the buildings, though geographically close to one another, have a different character, as reflects their individual role within the European Union, and are a celebration of its rich modern architectural heritage.
Wandering amongst these imposing edifices of metal and glass in the brisk November air, symbols of openness and inclusiveness across borders, it made me wonder why they come across as impenetrable to a curious visitor anticipating a warm welcome. It seemed to me there was a lost opportunity for understanding the part these institutions play in the stability of our post-war peace.
Palais de l’Europe, Strasbourg, home of the Council of Europe
When the first Europeans came together in 1949, there was a sense of shared purpose in the need to stop the horrors that happened during WWII repeating themselves. When the ties that bind us are being stretched to breaking point, it is important that we, as the next generation, remember and understand the meaning behind these buildings that house so much of what we value – if we could only see it.
Intentionally or not, we all bring our own talents and interpretation to a telling. In performing our story as a family, singing Fyfe’s favourite poetry, adding projections of photos – both our own and from an archive, and introducing his great grandson to stand up and speak his words we have made our personal histories part of the way we tell David Maxwell Fyfe’s story.
If our histories shape the person we become, how do those histories shape the individual ways we tell a story? In this companion to last week’s blog, Sue Casson explores how the histories of the newest generation of David Maxwell Fyfe’s family have defined the development of Dreams of Peace & Freedom: The Human’s in the Telling.
Our performance at St Luke’s had explored how the histories of Maxwell Fyfe shaped the man he became, centring on three separate histories that mark our difference: our educational and study history, personal and family history and the historical times in which we live, and these subtly altered our final draft of Dreams of Peace & Freedom. But if we are each the product of our little histories, how do those histories affect the way the storyteller presents a history?
For history is no straight factual account, but a series of accounts, facets to the fact. The words we use, the words of others we choose, what we leave out, where the emphasis falls – all of these are part of building a story. When we began to tell Maxwell Fyfe’s story by weaving Tom’s selection of his inspirational words, through my musical settings of poetry that had inspired him, our shaping of his story was dictated by inclusion, exclusion and my melody.
And intentionally or not, we all bring our own talents and interpretation to a telling. In performing our story as a family, singing Fyfe’s favourite poetry, adding projections of photos – both our own and from an archive, and introducing his great grandson to stand up and speak his words we have made our personal histories part of the way we tell David Maxwell Fyfe’s story.
But other histories Tom identified that evening have also influenced the way our project has developed. The technological times in which we live have contributed immensely, for with history, even history in the making, the availability of information at the time a story is told is key. Tom began with the gift of letters exchanged during the Nuremberg Trials, and he read widely to put these into the context of events at the Trial.
The Tack found amongst Maxwell Fyfe’s possessions
Over years of research however, more source material emerged. With our trips to the north of Scotland we discovered the significance of some of the other papers amongst those letters, notably the copy of the Tack of Tain, which led to research into The Napier Commission. The evidence given at Bonar Bridge of the injustice served on Fyfe’s great uncle, given by his uncle Hugh Fraser only became readily available online in 2015 – fifteen years after the letters were discovered.
Whilst the song Fyfe quotes in his Brussels speech, ‘to which we used to listen in more carefree days’ Ne Dis Pas, Tom discovered after years of searching, uploaded to YouTube in 2016.
We have drawn on our own educational histories to embellish our storytelling. At school Fyfe found the poetry of Rupert Brooke ‘trumped’ Wordsworth. But for Tom and me, the poet who ‘trumped’ all others was T S Eliot. We were both entranced by The Four Quartets, and I found the words of 13th century mystic Julian of Norwich which he quoted in the climax to Little Gidding so comforting, it became my private mantra whenever things were difficult.
‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
Four Quartets by TS Eliot
There seemed no better way to us than setting these peaceful, hopeful words, written whilst the Second World War was still raging, to follow a statement of Fyfe’s personal credo. There was no evidence that he found the solace we did in Eliot’s Little Gidding, but to us they seemed a fitting close to a story exploring the rebuilding of Europe after its’ destruction.
When we were looking for a way of expressing Natural Law and how Maxwell Fyfe’s dedication to the idea had grown, we could find no poem to set, so gathering images from the Shakespeare he loved and the atmosphere of the Waverley storybook, I plainly imposed the voice of the storyteller, blending them with lines from John Donne (with which he may or may not have been familiar) in an unaccompanied three voice anthem, breathing Maxwell Fyfe’s romantic Celtic spirit.
Later, behind the words, in the projections that now accompany the song cycle, we introduced the landscape of his childhood that flows through his instinctive love of natural law.
As Dreams of Peace & Freedom grew to The Human’s in the Telling, Sylvia and David Maxwell Fyfe’s story became part of our family story. We have spent time together exploring and recording the places they lived, interpreting them in strings of images, until the generations have gradually intertwined to blur the lines between subject and storyteller. Our story is one of a man who championed humanity out of the embers of inhumanity. And in relating it in our own way, we have become the humans in the telling.
As we continued on our journey of discovery, we managed to connect some dots to understand my great grandfather’s history and the history surrounding his love for the area, while marvelling at the places where he was inspired and capturing them through the lens of my camera. It was magical.
Lily Casson has been researching the life of her great-grandparents, Sylvia and David Maxwell Fyfe with her family for the last decade. Here, she uncovers clues surrounding the mystery of her great grandfather’s chosen title, Viscount Kilmuir.
“I had thought of calling myself Creich from the little place in Sutherland with the ruined chapel, the graveyard of which contains the bones of my forebears. Sylvia said that she was not going to spend her declining years spelling her name to butcher’s assistants, so I called myself Kilmuir of Creich –the ‘of Creich’ not being part of the title.”
A Political Adventure – The Memoirs of the Earl of Kilmuir, Chapter 13
Of the places that are associated with the life of my great grandfather, the Highlands is shrouded in mystery, like the mist that circles the peaks. The reason why he chose the name Kilmuir when he became an Earl is not known among the family. It was obviously a deeply personal choice, not related to any place he was living at the time – in London or Sussex – or had lived, as far as we knew, so setting off on a Scottish road trip in the autumn of 2012, it felt like we were on a detective hunt for clues that might lead us to discover more.
What did we have to go on? We knew that his mother, Isobel, had been born and brought up in Dornoch, in Sutherland, north of the Highlands. David was her only child, born when she was forty, and she clearly instilled in her son the memories of her childhood world, when they visited regularly for summer holidays.
“To me, the old tales were very close.”
Ibid.
he writes in his autobiography. What’s more, this wild country of lochs, set against the heather and the hills enchanted him.
“To the imagination of my boyhood the countryside … had a magic of its own.”
Ibid.
View from Bonar Bridge
In an introduction he was invited to write for a book written by a fellow Scotsman, George Sutherland-Levenson-Gower, 5th Duke of Sutherland, in 1957, he tells the story of
“A friend of mine, who … once told me that as a child she had always felt that crossing the Dornoch Firth was passing out of the Highlands into a strange country… I had an uneasy feeling that I knew what she meant. The very name Sutherland, the “southern land” looks north to the Viking settlements of Orkney and Shetland.”
Preface to Looking Back : The Autobiography of the Duke of Sutherland
Visiting places that he had known well, and getting to know them, gradually combined his memories with memories we created. We went to Dornoch, where Maxwell Fyfe was made a freeman in 1962, locating the house of his grandmother, which is now a B & B, and exploring its 13th century cathedral ‘built by the last Scot enrolled in the Calendar of Scottish Saints’ and dedicated to St Mary, before warming ourselves by a roaring fire in Dornoch Castle which it faces across the square.
Dornoch Jail
We came across Dornoch Jail, now an up-market shop selling beautiful jumpers and jewellery, and discovered a book telling the story of the late Clearances, where crofters were evicted off the land, in favour of more profitable sheep farming.
In one of the ‘cells’ we picked out a CD of ‘Celtic women’ which we used as a soundtrack to our travels. It was one of the traditional songs on that album, with words by Jim McLean describing the Clearances, that gave us the name for our show.
‘Dreams o’ peace and o’ freedom So smile in your sleep, bonnie babe’
Jim McLean
For Maxwell Fyfe had a copy of an agreement (a Tack) dated 1798 amongst his private papers. Drawn up by William Dempster, it ensured security for his tenants on the Skibo estate in perpetuity. That Tack was overturned 80 years later, and among those who suffered in the subsequent clearance, we later discovered, was Maxwell Fyfe’s great uncle, who ‘died, heartbroken’ on the day he was due to be taken from his family home and livelihood.
Maxwell Fyfe’s mother, Isobel, was just 17 at the time, and the injustice must have been shocking to her. The story was told as evidence at Gladstone’s Napier Commission in 1883 – which was held further down the Dornoch Firth at Bonar Bridge, which we also visited. Bonar Bridge has now all but subsumed Creich – within which former parish is the area where Isobel’s family were tenants in the mill from which they were later evicted, but the picturesque ‘ruined chapel, (and) graveyard’ containing the bones of his forebears remains. Travelling around in the car, listening to music inspired by the sweeping landscape and mirrored lochs, brought the East Highlands to life. As we continued on our journey of discovery, we managed to connect some dots to understand my great grandfather’s history and the history surrounding his love for the area, while marvelling at the places where he was inspired and capturing them through the lens of my camera. It was magical.
Dornoch Cathedral dedicated to St Mary
Driving north from Inverness, we found not one but two Kilmuirs – one on the Black Isle, overlooking the Moray Firth, and another in Easter Ross, overlooking the Firth of Cromarty. Maxwell Fyfe gives no indication as to which it might be. Although, as it was firmly pointed out to us at a museum in Tain, there are not two or even three Kilmuirs in the Highlands of Scotland – but many. Translated from the Gaelic, Kilmuir means Church of St Mary, and there are many of these in the north – and as we now knew, a cathedral in Dornoch.
Returning from our adventures, we have got to know Maxwell Fyfe a little better, having walked the landscape that shaped his beliefs. A member of a cleared family, a freeman of Dornoch, it is easy to understand his connection with this astoundingly beautiful place, and why the law of the land and natural justice had such an impact on his life – fostering his passion to confront evil and protect the innocent. Maybe the importance of the name he chose wasn’t finally in the places that we explored, but in the thoughts and feelings they evoked.
Every stroke of their pen tells a different story, and it is extraordinary to read a letter they wrote so long ago and feel a connection through the paper to my family, whether through a turn of phrase or choice of word.
Lily Casson first visited the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge when she and her family gifted it with the personal papers and official souvenirs of David Maxwell Fyfe. Here she describes how she has grown to know her great grandparents through these materials.
A memorable part of getting to know my great grandparents was through their letters exchanged during the year of the Nuremberg Trials, which we gifted to Churchill Archives in 2010. Every stroke of their pen tells a different story, and it is extraordinary to read a letter they wrote so long ago and feel a connection through the paper to my family, whether through a turn of phrase or choice of word.
On our first visit, an ordinary grey day in 2009, when I was 12 and Robert 9, we felt very important, carrying historical artefacts in our tiny hands down the long path to the centre, through the grounds of Churchill College, Cambridge, feeling the responsibility for the care in our charge. Among them, Maxwell Fyfe’s red boxes of office, containing the letters, along with a copy of the Grand Seal of the United Kingdom.
Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre shows Lily and Robert how the documents are kept
Since then, we have regularly visited to dig deeper into his story. Early on, we filmed a behind the scenes tour of the archive with its director, Allen Packwood, for Under an English Heaven, and it was eye-opening to discover the care and attention each document gets to conserve them, from the mesh between the papers to the fire safe boxes and rolling doors, saving them for a new generation to discover.
More recently, photographing documents for the Dreams of Peace & Freedom performance I’ve grown increasingly aware of how primary source material brings history alive, as these letters and documents, though now preserved in protective tissue, were written by real people, not just historical figures.
If you were telling how facts uncovered during the Nuremberg Trials led directly to the post war impulse across Europe to enshrine protection of human rights in law, music might not be an obvious choice…. though it’s the oldest way in the world.
Songwriter Sue Casson explores why David Maxwell Fyfe’s love of poetry, often quoting his favourites to drive home a legal point, made a song cycle the natural choice for a show that tells the story of his journey from Nuremberg to Strasbourg.
Recently, at a meeting where Tom Blackmore and I were pitching Dreams of Peace & Freedom, which tells the story of Tom’s grandfather, someone asked, ‘why a song cycle?’
It’s a fair question. If you were telling how facts uncovered during the Nuremberg Trials led directly to the post war impulse across Europe to enshrine protection of human rights in law, music might not be an obvious choice.
Although it is the way Tom and I have often chosen to tell a story, and as he would tell you, it’s the oldest way in the world. Troubadors since ancient times have entertained rapt audiences with mythic histories, in verse, in song – often with no more than their voice and whatever instrument was light enough to carry. What’s more, I’m a songwriter, Tom a writer – we write shows like that.
But really, that isn’t the whole story, and neither of us have put together a show quite like this before. For the link between those two important post war events was David Maxwell Fyfe, a well-read Scot, who often turned to poetry in his speeches to illustrate what he wanted to say.
In his closing at the Nuremberg Trials, David Maxwell Fyfe quoted Rupert Brooke’s War Sonnet V – The Soldier
‘sights and sounds, dreams happy as her day,
And laughter learnt of friends, and gentleness
In hearts at peace’
are not the prerogative of one nation. They are the inalienable heritage of mankind.’
David Maxwell Fyfe quoting Rupert Brooke in his closing at the Nuremberg Trials August 1946
This speech, the first he had made at Nuremberg, and written after he had forensically examined all the evidence and confronted the perpetrators, sets out his commitment to fundamental rights and freedoms, and signals his future involvement in enshrining them in law. It is the fulcrum of his journey from Nuremberg to Strasbourg. And to drive his point home – Maxwell Fyfe, a learned lawyer – quotes a poet: Rupert Brooke. If we were looking for an opportunity to incorporate music directly into his story it was this – poetry that he had chosen, demanding a musical setting.
‘I think that HJ never quite understood why I did, or how I could, prefer the wartime sonnets of Rupert Brooke to those of his hero Wordsworth.’
David Maxwell Fyfe writing about his English teacher at George Watson’s College in his autobiography, A Political Adventure (1964)
With this as our point of inspiration, reading the other four war sonnets in Rupert Brooke’s 1914 collection, published when Fyfe was just fourteen years old, Tom was struck by the way the poetic language expressing Brooke’s idealistic values at the outset of the First World War had filtered through into his grandfather’s speeches.
In his closing at Nuremberg, he not only quotes Brooke directly, but goes on to speak of ‘heritage’, a concept that closes Brooke’s War Sonnet III. As he seeks to create an enforceable treaty to protect human rights after Nuremberg, he champions Safety (War Sonnet II has the same name) and Security, which appears in the same sonnet. Norman Birkett, a British judge at the Nuremberg Trials, goes to considerable trouble to give Fyfe a Scottish poetry collection as a leaving gift, knowing exactly what it will mean to him.
For Maxwell Fyfe delights in finding the imaginative truth through reading, on occasion writing stories and verse himself.
‘romance … is poetry in action. It comes when the inevitable moment finds the inescapable deed,’
David Maxwell Fyfe writing of the tales that defined his childhood in The Watsonion, alumni magazine of George Watson’s College
This almost defines that moment at Nuremberg, when his closing speech expresses an awareness of rights and freedoms for all. A self-confessed romantic of the law, the poetry flows through Fyfe’s conscious and unconscious mind as he expresses what he is seeking to achieve.
In Dreams of Peace & Freedom, inspirational quotations from the speeches, letters and autobiography of David Maxwell Fyfe, naturally thread through musical settings of poetry he found inspiring. The melody infuses his chosen poetic words with another unspoken dimension – emotion to reinforce the story, rather as in his speeches, the poetry heightens the tenor of his legal argument.
Fyfe praised the ‘incomparable songs’ of Scotland, and so musically setting the poetry in his heart beside his spoken words seemed not only effective, but perfectly natural. It represents the imaginative life that informs and reinforces his legal practice. Which is the real reason why his post-war dreams of peace and freedom and how he sought to achieve them, are best brought to life in a song cycle.
When David Maxwell Fyfe flew out in October 1945, he described the city saying, ‘The old walled town was a heap of ruins.’ Today, however, Nuremberg is a buzzing, metropolitan centre, full of culture and life.
Lily Casson has been researching the life of her great-grandparents, Sylvia and David Maxwell Fyfe with her family for the last decade. Here, she writes her impressions of Nuremberg, which she first visited in April 2009…
Before going to Nuremberg in 2009, I had never been to Germany before. Apart from my patchy school history knowledge of the Second World War, I didn’t have any idea as to what I might discover. It had extra meaning for me, as we were going to find out about my great grandfather, who spent a year there after the war, during the War Crimes Trials as the chief prosecutor of the British team.
Nuremberg, 1945
When Maxwell Fyfe flew out in October 1945, he described the city saying, ‘The old walled town was a heap of ruins.’ Today, however, Nuremberg is a buzzing, metropolitan centre, full of culture and life. It has been rebuilt with care and attention, the buildings have been carefully restored to look new and vibrant. Inside St Sebalds, known as the peace church, an icon of renewal whose towers stayed standing throughout the bombing, the war is remembered with plaques that show the rebuilding process from ruins to the church it is today.
Documentation Centre, Nuremberg, former Nazi Rally Ground
The importance of remembering and confronting the past is at the heart of two museums in the city which tell the story of the Nazis from different perspectives : The Dokumentation Centre, set within the footprint of the Nazi rally ground, which documents the rise of the movement, and Courtroom 600 which brings to life the place where leading Nazis were cross-examined after the war. I, like many of the German schoolchildren who have visited, found it shocking to see the past brought to life where it actually happened.
Market Place, Nuremberg
The willingness of the people of Nuremberg to remember, whilst also moving forward with hope for the future is one of the reasons I love the city so much. Confronting the past with courage and conviction, and learning the lessons of history, it is a testament to the past and an example for the future – truly a modern miracle.
The Human's in the Telling 